Rumors of an impending Google phone coming out early next year have been heating up since late summer. Google is thought to be in talks with several phone manufacturers, including HTC and Samsung, to create mobile phones around its platform. Search Engine Land has a handy timeline of most of the rumors up through late August.
Today, the NYT weighs in, suggesting that Google’s large mobile effort (stemming from Google’s 2005 acquisition of Android) is less about competing with Apple’s iPhone than it is about competing with Windows Mobile. Remember, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple’s board of directors. Google’s focus seems to be more about creating a reference design with a new Linux-based mobile OS than entering the highly-competitive mobile handset market itself.
By creating a reference design and working with existing phone manufacturers, it appears that Google may be hoping to create an entire new class of smart phones, rather than a single, super Gphone. In this view, each manufacturing partner and cell phone carrier could develop their own set of unique features around the Gphone platform. One might create a killer GPS phone around Google Maps, for instance, while another might try to develop a YouTube phone with a great video camera and lots of on-device memory. The benefit of many Gphones would be the possibility of a lot more experimentation, but the downside could be that no one manufacturer implements all the best features in a single phone. Here are some of the features Google’s phone partners may have to work with:
—Free (or incredibly inexpensive) ad-supported phones.
—Mobile versions of Google apps like Gmail, Google Maps, Google Reader, Google Calendar, and YouTube, pre-loaded onto the device.
—Integration with GTalk, Google’s IM and VOIP software (this one is controversial because it would potentially bypass the carriers’ more expensive voice minutes, especially if combined with WiFi, but it could also mean more heavy usage of mobile data plans).
—GPay mobile payment software that turns each phone into a wallet.
—A true open-source platform on top of which anyone can develop their own apps.
This last one is key. Google can really distinguish its mobile effort from the iPhone by not locking it down to a set of pre-approved applications. The more applications (and the more types of Gphones to put them on) the better. There could be some sort of open-source certification or vetting process to make sure new apps don’t crash the phones, or at least to separate unproven beta apps from those that have been tested. (Maybe each carrier keeps its own list of approved apps, and anything else is downloaded at the consumer’s own risk).
If Google can get enough Gphones into consumers hands, the apps will follow. Because Google has a secret weapon here that no one else has—not even Apple. It’s called AdSense. If Google were to tie its mobile application development platform to its existing advertising platform, it could share future mobile advertising revenues with developers the same way it splits ad revenues with Web publishers today. Mobile app developers would flock to a platform that let them share in some of that Google ad money. Of course, the carriers and phone manufacturers might want their cut as well. But in a mobile scenario, it makes more sense to let each app developer help determine how and what types of ads are shown.
Here’s why: To the extent that such marketing messages can be targeted based on location or what the consumer is trying to achieve at that particular moment, the greater likelihood that those ads will be clicked on. So if I am looking at restaurant reviews on my Gphone, I might not mind seeing coupon offers for nearby restaurants, but a mortgage ad would be annoying. The individual developers have the best chance of making such ads a seamless part of the overall mobile experience rather than a distraction.
What features would you like to see on the Gphone?
I disagree. I don’t think they’re looking to create primarily a reference design. I think they want to create a marketable, branded cell phone to compete with other cell phones. This kind of thing is about marketing more than anything else.
Once they’re selling millions of cell phones, they’ll collect data directly from the conversations. They’ll integrate voice-recognition audio search, delivery of targeted, video/audio ads, and free cell phone service all in one handy device.
Their aim is to bundle the hardware with the software and the telecom features, all together in one package. Basically they’ll be able to replicate their success online in the telecom sphere.
I wish they would make a phone that allows you to play music and maybe even play music as your ‘ringtone’. That would be sweet.
oh how I love technology
It is obvious to anyone that has interviewed with Google in the last 18 months that they are planning some sort of touchscreen device (or software for a touchscreen device). How? By analyzing the questions that Google is asking the interviewees.
The problems I was asked to solve all involved common tasks for touchscreen browsing, such as how to determine the closest link to an arbitrary point on the page – the exact situation that arises when users “click” links by touching them (or near them) rather than using a more precise pointing device.
I suppose they see applicants as free labor that will be trying the hardest to come up with an innovative solution.
The only thing I want to know is; When can I buy one?
What if you could watch youtube on your phone. Oh that is so web 2.0.
I can’t wait ~!
i want to buy one,but i think it is a lower prince than iphone.
I think the key here is that they’ll be able to leverage audio data mining of people’s conversations into targeted screen ads, and thereby provide free cell phone service. Just like they mine gmail messages for keywords, enabling free email. You’re trading off the privacy of your cell phone conversations for free phone calls. And don’t let anyone tell you your calls will still be private. If they have the capability of mining audio conversations for keywords, there will be someone at Google who can monitor and record entire conversations. When you consent to their tapping your calls for keywords, you’re ultimately consenting to complete loss of privacy in your calls.
Gphone as a platform makes much sense, where third parties will be making apps. But I think their strongest power is adsense and using it to make everything cheap. SaaS is a trend on web, ofcourse it now would come to mobile/telecom as well.
I hope Gphones are cheaper than Iphone, and like adsense it provides people to make money by creating apps.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Very thoughtful post, Erick. Your reasoning is spot on.
google is sure to demonstrate what the web demonstrated – an open platform with no central planning committee will spur new markets. once and for all, apple’s “just works” controlfreak manifesto will be put in a hole and written off along with DRM and other controlfeak cruft.
its odd that apple still clings to ease of use and predictability for the iphone design. look at the people you know who have actually purchased iphones – do these people strike you as the type that want no more control over their phone platform than they have over their dishwasher? apple is serving controlfreak to a target audience of tinkerers…because only people fascinated in tech would pay so much for a phone in the first place.
I second #10. This was a great post. Informative, insightful, well-written. Brought some clarity to a confusing subject.
“If Google were to tie its mobile application development platform to its existing advertising platform, it could share future mobile advertising revenues with developers the same way it splits ad revenues with Web publishers today.”
That would be extremely-hyper-super-fantastic!
If Google goes too far down this route, the EU will sue them and force them to unbundle different features. For instance, they’ll say that it’s anticompetitive to sell a cell phone with search/ad features. Why? Because the EU says so.
noone cares about the EU.
The crappy picture that’s always shown sucks too!
‘ WAITFOR DELAY ‘00:00:20′ –
This hypothesis looks possible but you are not talking about the main point here ..what is google’s actual gameplan . My hunch is that google will try to pull a Microsoft act. see it like this
Reference design of GPhone is from Off the shelf Hw = IBM OPEN PC ARCH
Software part is supplied from Google = MS DOS
but unlike MS Office they will give away OS for free but they will tightly integrate Adsense in the core engine . they will make money and hopefully will share the loot. with Telcos.
Android was just a start of this BIG plan . this is a recap . things are coming full circle .
TrenchMice reported this 3 weeks ago. See http://www.tren...-phone-details/.
A music player intergrated into Google search where the ads pay for the streaming of free music!
Part of Google’s objective is to control the standards by which information is exchanged, and extend the limits of information exchange. They can’t just remain a keyword search company or their services will simply be used as a commodity. They could keep growing without a mobile platform, but that wouldn’t allow them to continue creating their “hypercube” of information exchange / media.
Google wants to extend their advertising + web service model to mobiles in a way that allows developers to create distributed web applications that run on all devices, or extend current web applications to mobile devices. Their platform will allow developers to control several unique aspects of mobile devices including location, identity, social graphs, device type. Google has been evangelizing Google Checkout and Maps APIs with great success, but there is no clean way to view a Google Maps mashup on a phone.
Facebook has some advantages over Google, but I think Facebook is sort of stuck in the browser without any integration with any useful services for consumers. A Google mobile phone platform would provide location data and provide access to payment, map, and social graph services.
Google probably has plans to integrate their platform with GrandCentral Communication, so that peoples’ email addresses and online identities would be tied to their mobile and/or GrandCentral numbers.
@Prashant
I agree with you I think. Google might not make it that easy for developers to extract user data in order to use advertising platforms other than Adsense. There will be a “secret sauce”. It will be much more practical and efficient for developers to use Adsense than anything else on the Google mobile platform. But first they need to provide mobile services that are superior to those of Yahoo or Microsoft, so that consumers actually want to use them. I think they will succeed.
Interesting, I will need 100 of these for affiliate pediatricians practicing our house call platform, we can run our entire practices off of one device if the browser is fast… High touch high tech health care. And to think I have been using a laptop and a treo for the past three years…
Natalie Hodge MD
Founder Personal Pediatrics Inc.
http://www.pers...lpediatrics.com
If M$FT can get this new Zune to do all it does and also have an EVDO WM6 Network in it, it will sell fast!
I love free stuffs especially from Google.com ! But have to ask another question, how much does it cost ?
This makes a lot more sense than most of the Google phone theories that have been bandied about. Google is not about to get into the consumer electronics market; that would be an insane distraction for them. (What would be next – the Google GameStation?) In a lot of ways, this project has more in common with the long rumored Google OS – except it’s not for the desktop
I wish in my home : Google TV, Google Frame, Google Desktop PC, Google Enter-Center…Free of charge…but no doubt, google could publish the ad to these devices.
You know – Samsung and Moto have some really thin phones. Is it too much to ask for a phone with a slide or flip out tactile qwerty keypad that maintains the SLVR size.
I need to make phone calls, check simple webpages, send and receive email/SMS – that’s it. I just can’t believe we still have to lug around any of these oversized phones.
I would like Google to develop a non-toxic, smudge-proof ink for targeted text advertisements to be placed on hamburger buns at White Castle.
Or how about Google dishwashers that analyze which brands of cheese slices you buy and advertise accordingly, or Google condoms printed with targeted advertisements.
Perhaps my generation will miss the in-tele-dildos that thrust based on Google search history and create social matches based on physical response.
Small factual error in the article. It reads, “…Remember, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt sit on each others’ boards of directors. ”
Steve Jobs does not sit on Google’s board.
I don’t think that advertisement on a cell phone will ever be substantial. When I call somebody, I talk and I hang up so how in hell could they advertise to me.
If there would be an advertisement “talking to me” before I want to call, I would simply not use it even if it is free and why would I want them to analyze my call to advertise about things I said. If I tell my wife some intimate things, I don’t want to get advertisement about underwear after that.
People, wake up here, it’s not all good coming from Google!
Steve Jobs does not sit on the Google board:
http://www.goog...rate/execs.html
But Eric Schmidt does sit on Apple’s board:
http://www.appl...r/bios/bod.html
I’d love to have a Linux based phone as long as it is “open” as other Linux platforms are. I wish it won’t be locked on the applications that you can run on it and will not have some kind of closed-source Gmail/Google apps client and Google will not try to compete in the same ways as MS did with Win Mobile. At least, avoid proprietary protocols like MAPI :p
I may put up with a Google Labs “This is broke” message on a lot of things – but not my cell phone. I think it is an incredibly improbable that Google can pull off the strategy outlined in this post. More here: http://lagesse....nes-the-better/
@Martin
How about when you visit a new city and you have your GPS enabled mobile device with Google Maps? And if you were taking some business associates out for dinner in that new city, would you not perhaps do a local search on your mobile device? And then, wouldn’t you use software to send a dinner invitation to twenty people, if that software was a distributed mobile application and saved you the time of confirming? And wouldn’t that application perhaps use Adsense to “serve” targeted advertisements to users based on Google account and location?
The services for the Google phone sound similar to what Blackberry provides, but more mobile and distributed and with a better business model for application developers and advertisers.
Of course it’s true otherwise it wouldn’t be on http://gphoned.com !
I think that the gphone and advertising are a natural fit, but you have to look at the GPS aspect of a cellphone. For instance, who cares about searching the text for key words for advertising. However, some people would love to know how close they are to something….like somebody you know, a cheap dinner, a cheap and local firesale, or whatever is within our proximity.
Nobody has really gotten a handle on this market yet, and I think this is a big one to be had, local advertising is what this is about and you have not seen anything in advertising dollars when you look at how much is spent locally as a total. Just look at the yellow pages, local papers, local billboards.
As far as the inclusive technology as a way to trap the consumer, I think that is not how this will be rolled out. I think that people who want to be locally googled will buy the device, which may just end up as an open source application. And in the end this may create a whole new industry. At 600 hundred a share, it only seems to be getting better. Maybe Jim Cramer was right when he said 900 a share by the end of 2007.
Martin: The problem with your example is that it isn’t at all what Google is interested in. See, the phone is simply an attribute of a more core concept, that being communication. Google at its core is a communications company. What they do and what they offer all satisfy facets of communication as a whole. Person to person, business to person, Google to person, it is all the same thing: communication. The cell phone used to be a cell phone, but now it is morphing into a personal portal, both incoming and outgoing. Maybe a better comparison is that it is becoming your own personal API, managing all electronic interaction. It is quickly becoming more of a digital prosthesis and less of a phone. Yeah, you make phone calls on it, but you also browse the web, you write emails, you visually manage your email, your broadcast your location to friends and family, you get directions, buy airline tickets, pay for goods. As broadband to the phone becomes the norm, then your phone becomes your personal portal. It is no longer a phone but a communication device and being an intimate part of (and monetizing) your communication life is what Google is all about.
If an open mobile platform is what Google’s aiming for, they might as well put their power into supporting Openmoko:
“OpenMoko is a GNU / Linux based open software development platform. Developers have full access to OpenMoko source and they can tailor their implementations to underlying hardware platforms.”
http://openmoko.com/
The current phone they offer is not very impressive but the platform sounds promising.
Google could make advertising money by using ThePudding’s technology, which does this: listens to the phone call to serve ads, but doesn’t keep the recording. I think they could just show ads when you ended the phone call.
If they simply added advertisements to a phone, that wouldn’t be a platform at all. It could be copied by the likes of Verizon and it wouldn’t offer any advantages to consumers, advertisers or application developers. Google would lose credibility and be beaten by Nokia, Microsoft, and even Yahoo on the basis of service quality via mobile phone.
I think that will boost competition and for the consumer less money, with several services. Of course Google will make the move its only is gathering services covering mobile market.
Erick, I don’t think there is any questions that “Google can really distinguish its mobile effort from the iPhone by not locking it down to a set of pre-approved applications. The more applications (and the more types of Gphones to put them on) the better.” They maintain the platform, allow developers to mash away at a million cool things. Monetize with AdSense – it is a beautiful world.
However, you quickly ran through the carrier issue. Don’t you think this is the real bottleneck? If carriers control the OS and the pipe, Google can be as open as they want but the carrier can still call the shots on what gets onto that phone. How does the Google platform overcome this barrier?
I think that a objective and candid examination of the progress in mobile applications over the last 10 years one will conclude it to have been a disaster. The carriers want to control the whole process and get a percentage of everything but their core competency centers very far from application development. Only third party MVNOS (which is what RIM really is) have been able to make progress because they have enough vertical integration (software, hardware and network access[through their NOC]). Without such integration the infighting is enough to ensure that major leaps wont happen. Qualcomm has had the most success with application development because of their vertical integration as well.
Based on what I have read about the GPhone, its much more significant than the iPhone as it would drive open platform development. All of the pieces are there to make this happen. The iPhone is very promising with great potential, but basically an MVNO like RIM.
Microsoft’s mobile software has come along way but it still bears the annoying characteristic of their applications – Client heavy. The future is client light.
Now is the time for all of this to happen. The EVDO networks work great, and Cingular is rolling out HSPA in 2h07. If Google is able to succeed with the G-phone it would certainly be a great opportunity for other developers as they’d finally have a more fertile platform for development.
I hope that Google finds a way to drive this forward as its no easy feat. One interesting question is, with the purchase of Navteq by Nokia and Teleatlas by TOMTOM, who will be the map vendor? Can Google build this on their own? Is it possible that the future of mapping interfaces will be materially different than those we see today?
Brad meikle – Brad@ampacresearch.com
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Verizon’s Voyager! – Now an iPhune/g-phune Killer!
The news for Apple and the iPhoney just gets worse and worse!
First we release the iPod Killer, Zune2, with FM radio!
THEN:
Verizon announces the LG Voyager phone! Mobile Magazine says:
“Remember how Verizon passed on the iPhone? That’s because the LG Voyager might even be better. It also has a large external touchscreen, but when you open the phone laterally, a QWERTY keyboard emerges for text entry. Key features include high-speed wireless broadband, a web browser, music player, and microSD expansion.”
Best of all it is driven by a proven OS, Windows Mobile! No playing on the screen with your fingers, we treat you like an adult.
Apple is on the ropes! They are down! They are out! It’s over! It’s over!
Thanks for the fact-check #29 and #31. Fixed in the post.
On the carrier issue, yes that is the big barrier. But they need people to use more data, and if Google can convince them that the Gphone will be a boon for their data services, they may play along.
#42, the carriers may control the pipe, but they don’t control the OS. That is what this is about. If Google can sneak an open OS past the carriers, all the apps come along with it (more or less).
Less Gphones the better
http://www.rajuthan.com/
Skype has really blown it big time. Why haven’t they worked with handset makers and provided a wifi VOIP cell with mp3/photos/video/web? I don’t get it.
Why does “long-distance” still exist this day and age? Do we pay more for “long distance email”?
I hope google brings in VOIP. BTW, why didn’t Apple bundle ichat? Why doesn’t the “Zune, the social” have messenger?
Can someone explain this? Why is there still this huge open space for a good easy VOIP/cell? The carriers will scream out and fight it like the RIAA, but who cares?
Meanwhile, skype, who’s lost quite a chunk of market value, is sitting still on the sidelines, waiting for someone to grab its market share. That someone will be the one providing a good wifi/cell to market.
hmmm… although this is a very cool, i just have one aversion. isnt it making phone tapping legal? i mean that’s how they’ll track our phone calls, right? so they can generate ads. even texting i think, they will track all the data/ “keywords” that we type. hmmm… they’re going to be the Big Brother in the mobile industry. wow! and the thing going for them too is that everybody loves google.
Great tech insight, equally great media insight !
Good Post. If you hate ads on TV, just wait! Google is out to create the most sophisticated ad engine the world has ever seen.
I don’t like it because it undermines my privacy and pushes tons of ads to me that I don’t want to see.
Lots of readers here endorse it because it will open up more channels to revenue for them, but ask consumers without an income opportunity.